


Paparazzi

by Mierke



Category: Take Two (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 00:12:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17032587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mierke/pseuds/Mierke
Summary: When an old friend of Sam's shows up for their help, Eddie and Sam stage a fight to lure out the paparazzi.





	Paparazzi

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skieswideopen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skieswideopen/gifts).



> Set sometime during the series. Based on the request for a casefic with someone from their past. Hope you enjoy, and happy Yuletide!

"Do you even know what you're doing?"

Around them, several people in the restaurant looked up, others pretending to haven't heard a thing. There were a few who kept eating and talking as if they literally could not care less and Sam was grateful for that. It was always good to see that in a world where everybody seemed to be interested in the mess she made of her life, at least some people just simply didn't care.

"Of course I know what I'm doing." Eddie put his knife down, and took another sip of his wine. For all she could see, he didn't care about this fight at all, and that _hurt_ (it shouldn't, the whole fight was fake and staged, but still, it hurt). "You don't need to worry your pretty little head about it."

"What's that supposed to mean?!" Sam had gotten out of her chair, indignation welling up within her as she tried to keep reminding herself, _it's not real, it's not real, it's not real_. The table seemed to shake with the fury building inside her, and she took a step back, taking her hands off it.

"I just mean we can't all be has-been actresses who have too much time on their hands and too little thoughts in their head."

That was it. She didn't have to fake the anger as she pushed away her chair with all the force she could muster, finding some satisfaction in the way it clanged against the ground, took her bag and stormed out of the building. Leaving the country club behind, she could only hope that at least they had gotten what they needed. She had been too upset to survey the restaurant for any paparazzi, but she trusted that Eddie had been keeping an eye on things the whole way through.

He wouldn't have started this fight if he didn't have a good reason. Would he?

* * *

"Ella!"

Sam hugged her friend, wondering how many people she had lost touch with over drugs and alcohol.

"Eddie, this is Ella-"

"Corr, the star of _Hot Suspect_ 's first season," he smoothly finished her sentence, as he reached out his hand for Ella to grab.

"I was just a guest star, but how sweet of you." Ella shook his hand, raising her eyebrows at Sam in clear surprise at his charm. Sam just shrugged; that had definitely not been her welcome when they first met.

"What can we do for you today?"

They sat down in Eddie's office, and for a moment nobody talked.

"Ella? Are you okay?" Sam stood up from her usual place at the table, and sat down next to Ella.

"I'm really not," she answered through gritted teeth, and slapped down a magazine on the table. "Can you get me his name?"

Eddie and Sam shared a look of confusion, and Eddie reached out to take the magazine. Before he could open it, though, Sam caught sight of the cover.

"No!" She grabbed the magazine out of Eddie's hands, and flipped through the pages. "How did they find you?"

Ella shrugged.

"I'm not sure. It's supposed to be an exclusive club for this very reason, but apparently someone snuck in anyway. I don't know if this is a regular person or a paparazzo, but I need his name. The magazine won't talk."

"Can someone fill me in?" Eddie held out his hand for the magazine, and Sam gave it back to him with a slightly apologetic smile.

"That," she said, pointing at the women on the cover, "are Ella and her wife, Clare."

"So?" Eddie looked back and forth between Ella and Sam.

"We've been married for 10 years," Ella said. "But I'm not actually out of the closet. This bastard just outed me. And worse, they outed Clare. She works at a non-profit organisation that could lose half its donors if word got out, so we kept quiet."

"That sounds lonely." Eddie put down the magazine on the table. "If we do manage to find the guy, what will you do?"

"I don't know," Ella said, her frustration and pain evident in her voice. "Beat him into a pulp, maybe. Make sure he never takes a picture again. At the very least get him banned from our club. I know everything I do is too little, too late, but I need to do _something_. Clare is sitting at home, tearing her hair out. I can't just let that pass me by."

* * *

"They won't release the name." Eddie hung up the phone, and looked at Berto. "Can you take a look at the security footage of the club, see if you can spot him?"

"I would, but the club keeps it under lock and key. Ella wasn't kidding when she said it was exclusive."

"Can we be sure it wasn't just a regular person?" Sam asked, looking at the photos again. "These days everyone has a cell phone camera, right?"

Berto shook his head. "No cell phone would get you this quality. No, this had to be someone with a high-grade camera, someone who knew his way around it, too."

"Why are people so obsessed with actors’ personal lives?" She knew this was about Ella, but she couldn't help feeling personally attacked by this case. How often had photos of her traipsing around town in her worst possible states ended up plastered all over the magazines, as if at that exact moment, hundreds of people weren’t doing the same thing around New York City? "We're just people."

"Not to them, you're not." Monica came into the office, and leaned against the doorpost. "You're like the Greek Gods of our time. People want to know all about you, because knowing you're human makes them feel less like a failure. If even the Gods mess up, what chance do we mere mortals have?"

"That's it, we can use that!" Eddie turned towards Berto. "If someone posts a picture on the internet, on one of those blogs, what would that be able to tell you?"

Berto blinked. "I could tell you the camera the person used, and possibly the date and time it was taken."

"Sam, what do you say we join an exclusive country club?" He turned towards her, his eyebrows raised. "If we can lure this guy into papping you, we can figure out who he is."

"Why would he be interested in me?"

"You're still Sam Swift," Eddie pointed out. "And we are going to stage the fight of the century."

* * *

Sam was pacing. She knew she was being ridiculous, but that didn't really change things. His contempt kept ringing through her head, and she had to wonder whether maybe it was true. Was she a has-been actress, holding on to a career that she didn't deserve, and crashing her way through another she was no good at?

Exhausted, she flung herself against her couch. She wouldn't get any answers tonight (Robert had promised to keep an eye on the web, but they really only expected results tomorrow morning), so she might as well relax. Oh, what she wouldn't give for a glass of wine. She shook her head against that thought and turned on the TV. A rerun of _Cheers_ would have to do for tonight.

* * *

"Did we get it?" Sam came barging in through the door, seeing no need for any small talk or decorum. She needed to know that this had been worth it.

"We did." Eddie held up a piece of paper, on which presumably the make and model of the camera was printed. "Apparently this guy specialises in the hard-to-get-into places, since we've found his mark over a couple of other pictures that really should not have been able to exist. "

"Can we use that?"

"We can't sue him, and weirdly enough, the people in the photos can't either. But if we can identify him, and we can provide proof to the places he's been staking out that he's been abusing their trust, _they_ will be able to sue him. Most of these places require a contract of sorts in which you promise to respect the privacy of the other guests."

Sam sighed. "That will have to do, I suppose. Now what?"

"Now we pretend to be paparazzi."

He turned to Berto, and a second later her phone pinged. "Berto just sent you a picture of what the camera looks like. He's done some digging, and it's apparently an older model than most of the paparazzi use nowadays."

"That explains why he thinks he can get away with so much."

Eddie just looked at her like he couldn't follow.

"Younger paparazzi usually have some sense of privacy, often beaten into them by the death of Lady Di and the fear of big brother. They are the people who know the privacy settings of their Facebook and Instagram and are a bit more prone to treating us like people. The old school paparazzi believe themselves above all that, and will use every trick in the book to get the picture they want. They think we deserve everything we get, never content with the things we want to give out."

Eddie opened his mouth as if to say something, but seemed to think better of it. He just looked at her, and Sam fidgeted uncomfortably under his stare. She looked away. "I do know my way around the biz, you know."

* * *

"If you're ever thinking about a career change, paparazzo would be a perfect choice," Sam said, her eyes firmly focused on the group of people sorta-not-really casually lounging at the park. They were pretty sure their guy was among them, but they had to snatch a picture of him taking a picture to verify.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Eddie lowered his binoculars. Sam could feel him looking at her, but she refused to look away. She could do this job just as well as anyone. Better, even, because she was trained in paying attention. Acting might seem to be such a broad and huge thing, but she knew, it was all in the details.

"You have the demeaning attitude down," she said. "And staking out a target for a client is pretty much the same whether that client is someone looking for revenge on a cheating partner or a magazine looking to make some money."

They had been waiting for over an hour, and Sam was getting restless. Their earlier fight was still ringing around in her head, and if she hadn't known before, she was now sure that being a paparazzo was not for her. She knew she was picking a fight, but she had to get this out in the open and being cruel seemed preferable over being vulnerable.

They had flirted with the idea of using Ella as bait, but Ella hadn't wanted any more publicity, not even to expose the guy who had outed her. So Berto had found some paparazzi groups online, and had found this tip about Andrew Montgomery, another one of Sam's previous co-stars. Sources say he was expected to show up at this park sometime this afternoon, and apparently, that was enough to get the vultures out.

"I help people," Eddie said. "I am nothing like them."

"Really?"

She could almost feel Eddie's sigh this time, as if she was the one being difficult. And okay, she was, but he hadn't apologized for what he had said, nor mentioned he hadn't meant it. Sure, she was an actress, but this had been off-script, and those ideas must have come from somewhere, right?

"What are you getting at, Sam?" Eddie was now completely focussed on her, and Sam turned around to meet his eye for a minute. 

"Spoiled, overprivileged, out of control ego. That's what you called me just before we met, you know." She turned back towards the paparazzi. "And just after, you managed to get in a jab about how actors are hard-working, talented and under-appreciated. Apparently, the moment you get that appreciation and rise to stardom, you believe that hard work and talent just flies out the window. I'm not sure how that works, but hey, in the world of Eddie Valetik, things don't have to make sense. And just the day before yesterday, you called me a has-been actress with no brain. Does that not sound like a paparazzi attitude to you?"

The silence that filled the car felt somehow worse than her outburst. Everything in her wanted to flee, but breaking their observation would only prove that she was unfit for this job. So she sat, her hands folded tightly in her lap, her mind conjuring up images of all the paparazzi photos that had appeared during her addiction to prevent the urge to drink to take hold. It never worked, of course, but that didn't keep her mind from trying.

"You can not be mad at me for a staged fight." Eddie sounded so incredulous that Sam risked another look at him. His face seemed open, honest, as if it really had all been a show and even the idea of her believing what he had said had never occurred to him. "You're an actress."

"I'm no good at improv," she muttered.

"I don't believe that for a second." He reached out to her, his hand almost touching his shoulder-

"There he is," she said. The next minute was a flurry of cameras and pictures, both inside and outside of the car. It didn't take long - Andrew was, after all, just passing by - and Sam felt a strange twinge of disappointment as Andrew left the park again.

"That was it?" she asked, and Eddie almost smiled.

"Had you expected some more excitement?" He put away his camera and readied himself to drive back to the office.

"I don't know. I guess I never thought about this from their perspective. It feels so... invasive and overwhelming when you're on the other end, that it's a bit anticlimactic to see how it actually works."

* * *

With their pictures of the paparazzo, Berto could verify that indeed, these pictures could have been taken with that camera. There is no way to tell for sure, he said, but it was enough to go on to try and catch the guy in the act.

So Eddie and Sam returned to the country club, where the owner apologized profusely for the intrusion of their privacy and did they want a private booth, free of charge? Both Eddie and Sam turned on their charm, let him know that there was absolutely no reason for that, that they didn't blame the club, and could they have the same table as before, please?

Sam felt exposed and vulnerable, and yet strangely comfortable with Eddie at her side. She knew she had to talk about what happened, she just wasn't entirely sure how to bring it up. Eddie seemed content with inane subjects like what to eat or the owner's shoes (which were, admittedly, terrible).

"My fiancée dumped me at the red carpet," she blurted straight through a diatribe on the advantages of the Callaway Rogue over the Tour Edge Exotics, and just how Eddie knew so much about golf clubs, she had no idea.

"I am aware." Eddie had his eyes on his menu, either to give her the space she needed to get this out or because he didn’t care about what she was saying. She sure hoped it was the former.

"My show was cancelled, my heart was broken, and I spiralled. And just like that, everything I did before, all the hard work, eight seasons of sweat and tears and yes, I loved my job, but it also took up my entire life, it was all… worthless. Erased, as if it hadn’t happened at all. All anybody saw, all _you_ saw, was the girl who lost it."

The waiter came to take their order, and Sam used the interruption to swallow back her tears. She had to get through this somehow.

"Ella used to be one of my best friends. She wasn’t with the show long, but we immediately hit it off, and we would meet for spa days or just go out for coffee. We talked for hours about anything and nothing, even about her and Clare, how they met, how stifling the closet could be, and we discussed countless strategies for coming out. I was one of the first people she told about being gay." A tear escaped her careful cage, and she wiped it away, praying she could get through this before more could fall. "After what happened, I pushed her away. I didn’t want anything to do with her or her happiness, and I was just so angry at the world. And then, when I got clean? She didn’t want anything to do with me."

"That’s crazy." Now Eddie did look at her, and Sam felt the sympathy in his gaze to the tips of her toes. 

"Is it, though? She did everything to keep out of the press. Just being _seen_ with me was a risk. She wasn’t willing to put her marriage on the line for some… failure." She took her glass of water for a drink, but before she could bring it to her mouth, Eddie’s hand had enveloped her.

"The day we met," he said. 

Then, he was suddenly out of his chair, and disappeared out of Sam’s sight. She turned around in time to see him walk up to the man they had photographed earlier today.

"I am so sorry, sir," Eddie said, and the man looked up from his salad. "But I believe you've been taking pictures of me and my partner, and I would like for those to be erased."

He talked loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear, and Sam could see the manager hustle around the room, obviously hoping to get in before things could escalate.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about." The paparazzo turned back towards his food, obviously thinking this would be the end of it.

"Then you won’t mind if I take a look at your camera, will you?" 

"Actually, I do." He took another bite of his salad, still seeming entirely unaffected by the whole thing. Sam could barely contain her glee as the manager arrived at the table, so clearly flustered by what was happening that she could only believe he would do the right thing.

"Give the man your camera, Jim," the manager said. "We’ve been having a security issue, and I would love to put this to rest as quickly as possible. We do pride ourselves on our privacy, after all."

He gave a distracted smile at Eddie, probably thinking he was being charming. Eddie didn’t even seem to notice, intend on the paparazzo – Jim, apparently – who was slowly and with a lot of reluctance getting his camera out of his bag. All Eddie’s muscles tensed, as if he was poised to run to follow his suspect at any moment, but Jim did nothing of the sort. He merely handed over his camera.

Eddie looked through it for a moment, and then wordlessly handed it over to the manager. 

"I can’t believe you’d do this to me, Jim." He turned off the camera. "I’ll have to bring this to my lawyer. Please leave now, or I will have you escorted from the building."

* * *

Ella had been grateful for their work. Sam was just sorry they couldn’t do anything more than get the man put on some kind of blacklist, couldn’t erase the damage that had been done. She was standing deep in thought in front of the elevator when Eddie called.

"Yeah?" She turned around, still a little distracted. 

He slipped past her into the elevator that had just arrived, and she followed him in. 

"You bring a lightness to my life that was lacking before." He wouldn’t look at her, stared straight ahead as the elevator doors closed. "When we met, all I had going for me was the satisfaction of a job well done, and those were few and far in between."

He took a breath, as if trying to figure out what to say. Sam wanted to reach out, but wasn’t sure whether his gesture from before had been real or simply a lure for the paparazzo.

"Not that I didn’t get the job done, there just weren’t a lot of jobs," he clarified, and Sam laughed. 

"Didn’t doubt it," she said. He gave her a distracted smile.

"You were right. I was demeaning. And it was easy for me to dip back into that mindset for our staged fight, because it’s the way I coped with the world for so long. Thinking myself above everyone was easier than feeling tossed aside."

She stepped towards him, then, giving up on any overanalysing, her arms snaking around his waist and her head against his arm. 

"I need you to know that’s not the way I feel anymore." His voice came from overhead now, and there was something inherently soothing about the way his breath caressed her hair. "I happen to think you’re brilliant."

"Brilliant, huh?" she whispered, as the elevator dinged to announce they had reached their floor. 

"Don’t let it get to your head," he teased, as he worked his arm out to wrap it around her instead. 

"I won’t." She cuddled deeper into him. "But thank you. I needed to hear that."

The elevator doors closed long before they had relinquished their hug.


End file.
